1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to information processing systems and, more specifically, to a bio-metric input device such as a keyboard (such as those commonly used for input to a personal computing device), touchpad, keypad (such as that used on a telephone or an automatic teller machine), mouse, touch screen or the like.
2. Background Art
Common current personal computing and/or communicating devices, such as laptop or notebook computers, cell phones, calculators, personal digital assistants, or tablet or palm-held computers, for example, may include an input mechanism used by the system to communicate with a user. The display of a tablet computer, for example, may be touch-sensitive for interactive user input by a finger, stylus or pen-like device. A notebook, laptop, or PC may, on the other hand, accept interactive user input through a keyboard or a pointing device such as a mouse or a touch pad. For a cell-phone, input may be entered by a user via a keypad.
For keyboards, touchpads, keypads and other touch-based input mechanisms, keys or key combinations are commonly pre-mapped to represent certain data values. That is, the data value to be communicated to execution resources of the system may be pre-mapped such that touching a particular key or combination of keys will result in the sending of a pre-defined value to the execution resources. In addition to discrete values (such as an alphanumeric value associated with each key on a keyboard), the mappings may include function values. Where an operation or set of operations is performed frequently, a particular key or key combination (such as, for example, control-alt-delete) may be defined for the frequently-performed operation. The user knows that each button or set of buttons performs a predetermined function each time it is pressed.
In some cases, the key-to-value mapping for a key or set of keys may be configurable by the user. This is similar to some applications where the user may define ‘shortcut’ keys on a keyboard of a computing device to allow frequent operations to be performed without requiring several levels of menus.
The field of biometrics, or the measuring of a physical characteristic used to recognize the identity or verify the claimed identity of an individual, has emerged as an increasingly reliable methodology for verification (one-to-one) and identification (one-to-many) of individuals. The use of biometrics has become increasingly common to address problems associated with requiring positive identification of individuals. One type of biometrical characteristic is fingerprint information, which can be used to test and either confirm or reject a user's attempt to gain access to an appliance, a premises, etc.